KIEV, Ukraine (AP) â€” The former write-in candidate for Arizona governor traveled to Ukraine looking for love. He ended up hungry and sick in a homeless shelter â€” the victim of an Internet dating scam.

Social workers were stunned to find Cary Dolego, 53, sitting on a city street last Wednesday, behaving strangely and suffering from pneumonia.

Dolego, who ran for Arizona governor just last year, had traveled to Ukraine this spring to do research for an engineering project and look for a wife. He says he met a woman named Yulia online and, hoping to marry her, went to her hometown of Chernivtsi.

She never showed up.

With nowhere to go and no money left, Dolego spent days roaming the streets of Chernivtsi along with other homeless men until he was picked up by social workers and taken to a shelter. He spoke to The Associated Press by phone Wednesday from a hospital where he was being treated for pneumonia.

"I was looking for a Ukrainian mate, a partner, somebody who would stay with me, be my wife," Dolego said. "All the Slavic ladies in this part of the world are absolutely delightful."

Social workers were shocked.

"He looked bad â€” his clothes were dirty, he was dirty, he looked like a typical homeless man," said Anastasia Beridze of the Narodna Dopomoha (People's Help) charity.

A woman who acknowledges being Yulia says she had been unaware of Dolego's existence during the Internet fling.

The woman, who declined to give her last name out of fear of attracting publicity, said in an interview with the AP that someone had hacked into her account on an Internet dating site and had been communicating with Dolego on her behalf, charging Dolego for those e-mails.

The woman, who was contacted through a mobile phone number provided by Dolego, acknowledged that the account he'd been interacting with on the site was hers. She denied being part of any scam. "What happened is ugly," she said.

Yulia, a 29-year-old doctor by training, said that after she found out what happened to Dolego, she paid him a visit to express her sympathy.

"I went to the hospital and he started hugging me: 'Oh Yulia, oh Yulia!' I was shocked," she said. "He thought we were getting married."

Dolego confirmed that she visited him and he believes they could still be together.

"We seemed to hit it off," Dolego said. "She wants to continue with the relationship."

Yulia has a different take. "He is not really my type," she said.

Before his Ukrainian adventure, Dolego, of Queen Creek, Arizona, says he was pursuing a Bachelor's degree in organizational studies at the University of Arizona.

Passionate about engineering, he claims to have designed a "lifesaving" method to keep ships from sinking and aircraft from disintegrating during a crash. He says he sold his house, truck and motorbike and left for Ukraine to further study the method here.

But Dolego, a twice divorced father of three, also had another goal â€” finding love with a beautiful East European woman.

After finding no support for his project in various Ukrainian cities and being evicted from a room he was renting, he said he boarded a train to Chernivtsi, hoping finally to meet his Yulia and settle down.

After he arrived, Yulia stopped answering his e-mails. With his U.S. bank account frozen and no means of supporting himself, he said, he became a homeless man. He was reduced to sleeping on the streets and seeking shelter at a local railway station, according to social workers.

"Things befall people that they cannot predict," Dolego said. "I will work through it."

Beridze said that besides being understandably worn out and ill after days of living on the streets, Dolego was exhibiting abnormal behavior. "He talks a lot and gestures a lot. He is acting strangely."

Beridze's group has contacted the U.S. Embassy in Kiev and is planning to buy Dolego a train ticket to Kiev, the capital, from where he could fly back to the United States. The U.S. Embassy declined to comment, citing the Privacy Act.
..

Damn....this is sad. This actually hurts the image of online dating. There will be scams and fakes across the board when it comes to online dating.
I feel bad for him. It's like you get your hopes up to find someone but it's a screw up.

What is equally sad is the comments on Yahoo that absolutely blame this man for his decision to go abroad in the first place. In almost every comment, no one makes the connection that after his previous two failed marriages, albeit to American women, he has decided to take proactive measures to actually rectify his situation. Going abroad and finding that proverbial happiness was probably the only reasonable solution from his experience. It is a shame he encountered this type of negative situation. You can clearly see he took a gamble liquidating all his possessions in the US before departing for good. In the end he took a chance which is more then anyone can say for the countless men stuck in a perpetual hellish marriage to an westernized oaf of a woman. You can see by the comments how many mangina men have taken on the role of aggressively attacking and ridiculing this man for his decision to better his fate. One can argue the logistics of his planning but seriously, at least he tried to find his happiness and was not self limiting his options by geography alone.

Propaganda. Although there are a lot of suckers and a lot of scammers to part them with their money... with the amount coverage this received.. and the shit writing of the article.. Yep! This story was made up. Some people write children's stories. Those without talent become journalists and write things like this. They could of made it realistic, but an article about a man having an uneventful but disappointing trip abroad doesn't manipulate the reader enough.

You have to make sure the sheeple get the message. Scare them with images of wandering the streets, penniless. Think about how many men will get discouraged from going abroad or at least to Eastern Europe because of this story. Notice that he's from Arizona, which is another clue because that is where most of the fake news comes from (i.e. congresswoman shooting).

How about some stories of American guys rendered homeless after their AMERICAN girlfriends scam them?

Dont hold your breath.

yes this IS propoganda. it is purely designed to scare, scare, scare. and guess what its gotta be ......a man.

They always try to scare people away for the longest time about foreign countries. its quit sad.

but the positive side about this...is that alot of men won't go to ukraine for fear of losing everything there.

kiev, ukraine has been unendated with LOTS of older american men. hopefully this propoganda story will
steer older men away from ukraine. so it can be wide open for guys like me ( a youngster ) to come on in
hihihihihihii

The story is so over the top, I have problems believing any of it. It sounds like it was made up by a Hollywood writer. However, that being said, I think Internet dating is worse than useless, and getting a good mate that way is something like winning a lottery ticket. I have no intentions of going back to Ukraine, so don't care who goes there.

Correct me if I'm wrong - did that guy go there without money? LMAO! What, he hoped to buy a ticket and stay with the girl at her place? The article doesn't state that he was robbed or lost his money, does it? How the hell his U.S. bank account got "frozen"? Could he just call his bank? Ukraine has phones, you know

What a bunch of crap! This story is either made up or this guy is a complete retard. Who goes to foreign country like that? Did he even talk to the girl on Skype? LOL. I would do that for sure, at least that. Why go somewhere without booking even basic hostel first? Or rent an apartment? Or at least buy a 2-way ticket and keep it in the locker at the airport?

LOL. American guy becoming homeless in Ukraine. This sounds like a joke!

Bank accounts can easily be frozen IF the person does not INFORM their bank that they will be traveling overseas.

Hell, my credit union (a police, fireman, and military credit union no less) started to lock my account each time I ordered computer parts from NewEgg (arguably the biggest online electronics vendor). I called and asked them to review my purchase history over the last decade or so to confirm that I was indeed a regular NewEgg shopper. But they kept trashing my NewEgg purchases, forcing me to re-order with my wifes credit card. Once I determined that the people at the bank were fucksticks, I simply started filing grievances with the credit union customer service people. They STILL kept dumping my online purchases. It all stopped once I started filing BBB complaints every time it happened. Now my NewEgg orders go through with no problem. Sad part is, it took me MONTHS to get it all sorted out. Bank employees tend to be really twitchy, so I can see how this clown got hosed in Ukraine.

How about some stories of American guys rendered homeless after their AMERICAN girlfriends scam them?

Dont hold your breath.

Based on the homeless shelter that I used to stay at, I did a survey on how many men ended up there as a result of their ex-American girlfriend crying wolf on them or because a feminist-female judge had put them in jail just so that when their term had ended that they would have to go to the shelter in order to have a roof over their head.

Not to my surprise, 80 percent of them at that homeless shelter ended up there because of an American female.

"I appreciate the opportunities I have in America. Opportunities that allow me to live abroad." **Smiles** - Have2Fly@H.A. (2013)

"The only way to overcome that is to go abroad to get a broad."
- E. Irizarry (2009)

How about some stories of American guys rendered homeless after their AMERICAN girlfriends scam them?

Dont hold your breath.

Based on the homeless shelter that I used to stay at, I did a survey on how many men ended up there as a result of their ex-American girlfriend crying wolf on them or because a feminist-female judge had put them in jail just so that when their term had ended that they would have to go to the shelter in order to have a roof over their head.

Not to my surprise, 80 percent of them at that homeless shelter ended up there because of an American female.